The news columns are no place for a fling with literary license: Ted Diadiun

Associated Press, The Public Theater, Stan BarouhMike Daisey performs "The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," which includes false assertions presented as facts.

"People don't ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts."

A writer-researcher named Robert Keith Leavitt made that rueful observation in 1939. I'd never heard of Mr. Leavitt before I began casting about for a quote to get this column off the ground, and as someone who has spent a long career believing in the value of published truth and facts readers can trust, I'd like to think he's all wet.

But I don't know. Last Sunday, at the same time this column was celebrating our staff's dedicated quest for reliable facts in the Robert Bales story, reporter Henry Gomez was on Page One citing a survey that seems to show that politicians' lies don't cost them much at the ballot box.

That politicians sometimes fall short of the truth is not startling news; the fact that their supporters don't care is more puzzling.

Gomez's reporting, combined with Leavitt's 73-year-old quote, presents a troubling picture. And a couple of recent news-related episodes won't calm those of us who value information we can believe.

One comes courtesy of the popular NPR radio broadcast "This American Life."

In January, host Ira Glass had devoted a show to monologist Mike Daisey, who was just finishing a successful run at the Public Theater in New York City with a presentation called "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs."

The show was a searing indictment of the way Apple products are manufactured in China, featuring tales of children as young as 11 laboring in factories, workers forced to stand so long at their jobs that they couldn't bend over, people who worked with dangerous chemicals without any protection, and other horrors.

The centerpiece was the tale of a man whose hand had been mangled in an accident while building iPads. The worker was cast aside when he could no longer perform that task. Daisey told of how he spoke to the man through an interpreter and showed him an iPad -- the first time the man had ever seen the finished product. As he ran his ruined hand over the screen, Daisey said, the man pronounced it "magical."

The show was a huge success, drawing 800,000-plus podcast downloads -- the most in TAL's history.

However, Glass had not confirmed enough of the story.

An attempt to reach the interpreter stalled when Daisey said she had changed her cellphone number, and ultimately Glass decided to take the elements of Daisey's story at his word.

That was a mistake -- as Glass discovered to his chagrin after another public radio reporter tracked down and interviewed the interpreter.

The interpreter said Daisey never talked to any underage workers in her presence. The reporter found that the part about dangerous chemicals occurred 1,000 miles away from where Daisey said it had, and under different circumstances. And the worker with the mangled hand? Never happened, said the interpreter.

To his credit, two Sundays ago Glass devoted his entire show to a retraction, including an excruciating interview with Daisey.

Caught red-handed, Daisey incredibly said he stood by his story and seemed abashed only by having been found out.

He calls what he does performance art. "I'm not going to say that I didn't take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard," he said on the retraction show. "My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it's not journalism. It's theater."

Shortcuts? Theater? I'd guess you would look long and hard before finding anyone who listened to Daisey's story and didn't believe things had happened just the way he said they did. Would that not change their opinions of Steve Jobs and Apple? Daisey apparently didn't care, as long as his "art" was intact.

D'Agata and Jim Fingal, a fact-checker for "The Believer" magazine, over an essay D'Agata submitted about the suicide of a 16-year-old boy in Las Vegas.

The book goes on for 123 pages, but all you really need to know is found in the battle over D'Agata's opening paragraph:

"On the same day in Las Vegas when sixteen-year-old Levi Presley jumped from the observation deck of the 1,149-foot-high tower of the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino, lap dancing was temporarily banned by the city in thirty-four licensed strip clubs in Vegas, archaeologists unearthed parts of the world's oldest bottle of Tabasco-brand sauce from underneath a bar called Buckets of Blood, and a woman from Mississippi beat a chicken named Ginger in a thirty-five minute game of tic-tac-toe."

Checking the facts, Fingal discovered that none of that really happened on the same day, that there were really only 31 strip clubs in Vegas, that the bar was really named the Boston Saloon, that it was really in Virginia City, 450 miles from Las Vegas, and that the woman was really from Las Vegas.

D'Agata was no more troubled by his manipulating of facts than was Daisey. Presented with Fingal's questions, D'Agata explained most of them away by saying that he made the changes to fit the rhythm of the story.

As for the woman: "I needed her to be from someplace other than Las Vegas."

D'Agata, you should know, teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa.

In what universe does someone invent a man with a mangled hand and then act surprised when people who believed feel betrayed?

In whose world does a nonfiction professor become offended in the name of "art," when called to account for making up whole paragraphs of coincidences, nonexistent bars and misplaced women and chickens?

Some people may prefer emotions to facts in their stories, but who among us enjoys being made to feel foolish for believing sources of information we had thought trustworthy?

There's nothing wrong with bringing some style to our storytelling, but only if the truth is preserved. If I have to make a choice, I'll take just the facts, ma'am.

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